Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense Review: Ants On a Mission to Protect

Rating:

Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense Review: The game is exactly what it says. You establish trails to food, leaflings, or treasures and build up defense perimeters to protect those trails.

The anthill is the center of your strategy. It’s where worker ants emerge from to shuttle carcasses back to the colony for food. Solider ants also appear to take out bugs that pose a threat. When they’ve successfully killed an enemy, the worker ants can take over and haul the carcass away. There are also bomber ants that can be dispatched with the tap of a finger to provide air support.

Your task is to use your finger to draw a trail that might connect several carcasses, for instance, and then deploy worker ants to follow that trail and bring them in. You would do something similar for soldier ants, except that you would concentrate on drawing a perimeter to defend against, or sometimes a direct line to attack, the swarms of incoming bugs that threaten the anthill.

One of the challenges is that if you just leave trails in place, your troops will be wasted going where they are not needed. So another part of the game requires you to manage trails you’ve drawn and delete them when they’ve outlived their usefulness.

Attacks come in waves and battles have time limits. You have to complete the mission in the time allotted to move to the next level. At times its gets a bit crazy with everything going on: trails crisscrossing, bugs swarming, troops dwindling, and a timer counting down. But that’s what makes it engrossing.

Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense {$1.99} has some great cartoonish characters. General Hardass has to be one of the best. And in an environment dominated by greens and browns, it would be easy for things to be camouflaged and difficult to see. But the characters and trails stand out enough from the background to make that a non-issue. The music is a bit more humorous spy-type than military, but it suits the game well. And the sound effects are amusing.

This game presents a different challenge than most. At first it appears a bit simplistic and easy to master. And then the swarms come and the screen gets messy. Don’t underestimate the fun and difficulty of Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense for iPhone and iPad.
What we like:

You control the strategy, lots of ways to play

Lots to manage, requires focus

Few controls available which makes tactics paramount

What to know:

Lots going on for a small screen, occasionally difficult to see what’s what